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Ali A. Rizvi

4 Nov, 10 tweets, 2 min read

Learnings from last night:

1. Biden likely wins. He's got AZ and NE-2 and WI, is holding NV, and if he wins MI (he's leading there with over 90% of the vote in), he's already at 270. He won't need GA or PA then, but could win at least one of those too.

2. Bernie would NOT have won this. Big lesson: The socialist/communist tag Trump pinned on Biden/Dems worked. Cuban Latinos likely cost him Florida. This could've been a wider effect if Bernie was the nominee. Far-right candidates can win in America but far-left candidates can't.

3. Fox News has a fantastic team of statisticians who probably pissed off Trump more than the other networks by calling Arizona for Biden earlier and sticking by it. They consistently had a higher electoral count for Biden vs Trump than the other networks, and they were right.

4. The lawsuits/recounts will come, but it's hard to see them having any dramatic impact if Biden's margins in MI/WI are wider than Trump's in 2016. Trump may fight over Pennsylvania, but that probably won't have an impact on the electoral count.

5. Importantly: A solid but narrow Biden win is a bigger repudiation of far-left "wokeism" than a Biden landslide would've been.

The message from this election is that voters will choose moderate and conventional liberals over those seen as radically leftist. The #1 message...

...that Trump was able to tar Biden with was that he was a radical leftist socialist. Biden largely pulled this off by rejecting the far-left wing of the Democratic Party. Again, far-right candidates can win in America, but far-left candidates can't.

A solid but smaller Biden win clearly tells mainstream liberals that the wokes are their political albatross. They should distance themselves from illiberal wokeness like Biden did (it didn't totally stick, but it stuck enough).

A larger win may have bolstered them.

6. Finally, Republicans increasingly have to rely on anti-democratic elements of the US system: (i) the Electoral College (winning the popular vote is all but irrelevant now) (ii) a Supreme Court where 5 of 9 unelected Justices were appointed by presidents who lost the popular...

...vote; and (iii) a Senate where California's 40 million people (more than all of Canada) and Wyoming's 600,000 people each get 2 Senators, and just 18% of the US population elects a majority of Senators (52). Yes, this means Republicans are smarter and more strategic about...

...winning, but it also means liberal Democrats are now a consistent majority in the United States. This is working for now, but is unsustainable for Republicans in the long run. The fact that Texas was so close in an election where Trump did so well is just one sign of that.

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Ali A. Rizvi

@aliamjadrizvi

23 Sep

This must be said:

Democrats need to go and VOTE IN PERSON.

Put on your masks and sanitizer, keep your physical distance, and VOTE. IN. PERSON.

Do not vote by mail-in ballot, unless absolutely necessary.

There are now two huge reasons why this is necessary:

1. Mail-in ballots are rejected at much, much higher rates than in-person ballots.

Missing or mismatched signatures, envelope problems, missed deadlines, and other issues resulted in **OVER 500,000** mail-in ballots being rejected in the primaries.

Seriously.

Considering the razor-thin margins many battleground state elections come down to, it's obvious that this is not a risk Democrats can afford.

Worse, the mail-in ballots most likely to be rejected are from minority, first-time, and younger voters.

Read 8 tweets

Ali A. Rizvi

@aliamjadrizvi

22 Sep

I don’t understand this naïveté around hoping that some Republicans will “do the right thing” and vote against moving ahead with filling RBG’s seat. Even the Republicans who hate Trump are with him when it comes to the Supreme Court. It was a major motivating factor for them back

in 2016. Now they’re looking at a 6-3 conservative majority Supreme Court. So WHY WOULDN’T THEY DO IT?

If the situation was reversed and Clarence Thomas had just croaked and Democrats had a chance to have a liberal majority SCOTUS just before an election where Republicans were

looking certain to win and the filibuster wasn’t a barrier, OF COURSE the Democrats would push through a nominee. They would flip flop, they would rationalize, they would do whatever they need to do to ensure it.

It is completely legal and constitutionally permissible for a lame

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Ali A. Rizvi

@aliamjadrizvi

28 Aug

What do the rise of the far right, the far left "woke" movement, cancel culture, recent spikes in racial tensions, violence and vandalism have in common?

They all happened during the Trump presidency.

And now Trump is asking you to re-elect him for four more years.

Okay, fine, here's some context (thread):

What I'm getting at here is the rise of these previously fringe ideologies into the mainstream. The far-right is in the White House, and the far-left is heavily influencing mainstream Democrats — though the far left still hasn't fully

overrun liberals the way the far right has fully overrun conservatives.

What made the far left move from the fringe to the mainstream? Well, extreme governments legitimize extreme oppositions. This is why I think it's important to have mainstream liberals like Biden in office...

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Ali A. Rizvi

@aliamjadrizvi

25 Aug

@YasirQadhi

This may well be one of the most important video clips about Islam ever, and it comes not from any secular activist, but Islamic scholar @YasirQadhi himself. The printing press was indeed declared haram by the Ottoman Empire, and the use of it was punished with death.

/1

https://twitter.com/abdullahadam/status/1298318437882765317

So while Christian Europe underwent an Enlightenment that skewered Christian theocracy and propelled it out of the Dark Ages into the enduring and prosperous time of secular liberalism we have today, the Muslim world stayed where it was—a place where

/2

any and all innovation and free thought was considered heresy, blasphemy, or apostasy.

If this hadn't happened, would we have a diluted, reformed, or "protestantized" Islam today, separate from the state, as we see with Christianity?

/3

Read 5 tweets

Ali A. Rizvi

@aliamjadrizvi

31 Jul

THREAD:

A lot of these culture wars are just the same age-old generation-gap “Ah, kids these days...” conflicts. The difference is, everyone has a Twitter platform to vent their recreational outrage.

There are bigger battles to fight than getting triggered over “individuals with a cervix.” Who cares? Trans men have cervices, and millions of women who’ve had hysterectomies don’t. What difference does it really make to your life if...

...your children are destined for a future that makes a distinction between biological sex (natal male, natal female) and gender identity (man, woman, boy, girl)?

Of course biological sex is real. You wouldn’t need terms like cis or trans if it wasn’t. You wouldn’t have...

Read 9 tweets

Ali A. Rizvi

@aliamjadrizvi

13 Jun

Thread.

"The United States is one of the least racist countries on the planet."

This is a fact. And most immigrants in the US who grew up in places like the Middle East, Asia, or even the nation-states of Europe know this. The US and Canada are two of just a handful of

countries composed almost entirely of immigrants. And when you do see racism in countries like the US and Canada, it's not because it's more PREVALENT than in China or Saudi Arabia; it's because it's more VISIBLE: we have robust systems of transparency, accountability, and

justice — thanks to the public, the free press, and the government.

But it's really important to remember HOW America became one of the least racist, misogynistic, and homophobic countries in the world. It is precisely BECAUSE of protests like the ones you're seeing now.

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